Natural language search engine Powerset has soft-launched with a search engine that so far indexes Wikipedia and Freebase.
Michael over at TechCrunch loves the service but rightly notes “There is no way to look at Powerset today and determine if it can be as disruptive to search as Google was when it launched almost a decade ago. That’s because it only queries Wikipedia.” Out of the box the natural language capabilities have a wow factor, but only in terms of an Ask Jeeves 2.0 with a limited search base. The unknown question is still how this would apply to the broader web, and without knowing that, providing any major kudos to the company is speculative at best.
The video above shows how it works, or you can visit Powerset here for a test drive.
